A Day in the Countryside
by Agent of the Apothecary
Summary: He is older, she realizes. That makes sense, as Susan herself is older, but as she hasn’t thought of the King of Narnia in quite some time, the change is far more startling than it might have been otherwise. How could she have forgotten him?


**Story:** A Day in the Countryside

**Summary:** He is older, she realizes as she stops tugging in some mixture of shock and serene acceptance. That makes sense, as Susan herself is older, but as she hasn't thought of the King of Narnia in quite some time—no daydreams, no nightmares, no befuddled meanderings—so the change is far more startling than it might have been otherwise. He looks so pleased to see her, smiling gently so his eyes crinkle in the corner, that she feels guilt fold her stomach. How could she have forgotten?

**Notes:** God. Angst, angst, angst. With a touch of smut, and then a bit more angst. (In related news: WHY IS MY LIT WORK SO DIFFICULT???) I need to stop being distracted by Ben Barnes's general prettiness and get down to business. Bad Bella.

**Disclaimer:** Ughness.

* * *

In what is probably the worst decision of her entire day, if not her entire life, Susan smiles at the boy when he offers her his hand. She really should know better by now (and despite what Peter says to the contrary, she has not ensnared the _entirety_ of St. Jude's School for Boys' student population already, if simply by virtue of the fact that half of them are younger than she is, and even Susan will not stoop so low), as Susan has had quite a lot of experience with members of the opposite gender.

But Susan Pevensie is nothing if not circumspect in manner and as the boy offers her his hand and she gratefully takes it to climb to her feet, her lips tilt into the smile automatically, a motion that not even the cynicism of a war-time London girl can smother. "Thank you," she says, already smoothing her skirt and picking up her bag.

She has every intention of continuing along her way—Ed has drunken the last of the milk, and Lucy has been hinting piteously that they haven't had biscuits with tea in ages—when the boy shades his eyes and says, "Susan?" in a tone of such complete astonishment that she immediately stills. The sun has put him to a disadvantage, so she takes the moment to take in his face (soft, symmetrical, probably pleasing to someone less distinguishing than Susan) and tries to remember if she has seen him before in her life. She is really sure that she hasn't, but social mores dictate that she act as though she has.

"Michael," he continues quickly, taking her hand and shaking it. Susan reciprocates the gesture with middling enthusiasm. "Michael Wetherby. We met a few summers ago, during your stay at the country. My uncle brought the Professor milk every morning."

"Ah," says Susan. "Of course, Michael. I remember." She doesn't. "How have you been?"

"Fine," he says. "Mum sent me and my sisters back to London for school after the accident. I've been at St. Jude's for a little while now; I think I've seen Ed and Pete about."

Susan bobs her head in one short burst, before continuing to mentally compose her grocery list. She has little interest in a continuing acquaintance with Michael Wetherby, but when he suggests that she have tea with him, "payment for me being an idiot and bumping into you," she has to accept. She has never failed to be polite to Ed and Peter's friends, provided they are neither cretins nor imbeciles. Michael Wetherby, unfortunately, shows a tendency towards neither, and Susan therefore has no defensible reason for severing their contact.

Showing rather admirably persistence, Michael Wetherby pursues an acquaintance with Susan. He walks her home, takes her to tea, and reintroduces her to his (many) sisters. Susan is coolly distant, but Michael displays a regrettable lack of intuition and fails to notice. He sneaks the subject upon her when she is distracted by her end-of-term project, and when the summer comes around and school is let out for an extended break, Susan Pevensie has become the Property of Michael Wetherby without quite realizing the hows and whys.

She tries to dislodge him, even venturing into the realm of deliberate cruelty, but, resembling an overly-large and enthusiastic puppy, Michael stays to her side, glued to her like an octopus. Lucy, Edmund, and Peter find the situation hilarious, and Michael's sisters are split between cooing delight and jealousy over Susan's rather cold confidence. As Susan Pevensie has never been unassertive a day in her life, she is probably the only one to blame for why her relationship with Michael is never ruined. She doesn't try terribly hard to get rid of him because he has always seemed relatively harmless, if only a little too effusive in physical affection.

She regrets this lack of foresight when Michael suggests a trip back to the country to visit his mother. They sit next to each other on the only train of the morning, an empty basket on Susan's lap and Michael's side pressed against the window. The soldiers on leave walk in pairs up and down the aisle, chewing on the ends of their fags and eyeing Susan's exposed leg, her slim ankles and high heels and the mended hem of her skirt, with a sort of bored connoisseurship. A few of them make eye contact and smile. Susan never smiles back, as she has learned the hard way what encouraging boys will do.

The station is bare and tired, the few signs still hanging rusted from disuse. Susan picks her way across the floor carefully even as Michael bounds ahead to check for his mother's buggy. She catches a view of herself in a window, a reflection of a poised young woman, and she pauses to fix her hair, tucking the loose ends under so that the entire mass is collected at the base of her neck, before continuing to trek across the sea of the cracks and loose floor tiles.

That Michael's mother does not like Susan and Susan does not like Mrs. Wetherby is appallingly obvious after the first three minutes in the buggy. Michael, either insensible of the conflict of interests or pretending so as to save himself the emotional strain, chatters about their last year of school for the entire ride. Back at his mother's farm there is work to be done, and Mrs. Wetherby insists with drawn lips that Susan not assist; she decides to go for a walk, the only other option being twiddling her thumbs at the kitchen table while Mrs. Wetherby peels potatoes with a sort of muted lethality.

She exchanges her heels for a pair of Michael's old wellies, and soon sets off. The landscape is pretty enough, dotted idyllically with trees and the occasional cluster of sheep, and Susan is soon tottering down a dirt road, clutching a fag between her fingers and inhaling the smoke with the sort of gusto normally reserved for victims just rescued from axe murderers or mother-in-laws, wishing rather desperately to be anywhere other than the countryside. Susan despises the countryside.

But eventually her fag runs out (as they always do) and the halcyon sheep and cows become smelly and irritating (as they always do), and Susan is bored. She wishes that she had thought to bring her sketching things, but being around Michael has numbed her mental capacities to the degree that Susan is almost certain she is becoming progressively duller every moment she spends with him. But at the same time, she has found herself quite incapable of setting him loose.

She wonders, as she wraps the trailing ends of her sweater around her midriff and eyes a pair of nasty-looking clouds on the horizon, if this is how most unhappy marriages begin; one half of the couple is unable to hurt the other's feelings enough to end the relationship. If this is true, Susan convinces herself, then breaking up with Michael might just be considered a good deed of sorts.

Infinitely cheered by this thought, Susan tops the hill and quite literally stumbles upon the ruins. As she catches the toe of one of Michael's too-large wellies under a stone and begins to fall, she can only think that Mrs. Wetherby will be mightily pleased if Susan Pevensie were to break her neck and cease her continued corruption of Poor Dear Michael.

Susan, however, does not break her neck. She doesn't even manage fall quite far, even, as she scrambles for a handhold and latches onto something of crumbling, woody texture. The splinters bite into her palm and one actually cracks, lodged in her hand as her momentum carries her away, and the next moment she crashes into the side of a bed and a host of pillows fall on her head.

"Bother," she says, thrusting at the pillows and smearing her blood all about. "Bother, bother, bother." Susan doesn't believe in swearing.

She is confused for a good while, as she claws her way out of her goose-down burial site, as the accident (a euphemism for an air-raid, as are most "accidents" in the countryside) decimated the Professor's old house and left nary a sign of anything other than a few stone floors, let alone a host of pillows that would do the queen mother proud. She is contemplating the possibility of the queen mother having taken residence in the dilapidated ruin of a house when she runs out of pillows and takes a handful of hair instead of linen.

"Ah!" cries owner of the fistful of hair.

"Oh!" cries Susan.

Her fingers, a little bloody and smeared with dirt from her tumble, catch in the hair as she attempts to release her palm, and then a pair of dark eyes blink are blinking at her, a palm slapped on the floor by her head for balance, and Susan Pevensie of Finchley stares into eyes ringed by lashes like lace and Remembers.

"Susan?"

"Hullo, Caspian."

He is older, she realizes as she stops tugging in some mixture of shock and serene acceptance. That makes sense, as Susan herself is older, but as she hasn't thought of the King of Narnia in quite some time—no daydreams, no nightmares, no befuddled meanderings—so the change is far more startling than it might have been otherwise. He looks so pleased to see her, smiling gently so his eyes crinkle in the corner, that she feels guilt fold her stomach. How could she have forgotten?

Her fingers come free with little work, now, and Caspian clambers to his feet before reaching to help her as well, his hands pulling at her wrist and catching her waist as she stumbles in Michael's cursed wellies, which she has already decided will be the irrationally blamed perpetrators of the incident. Brushing at the back of her skirt gives her an excuse not to look at him (they never said she was brave), but too soon she appreciates that she is getting blood on her only good weekend skirt and perhaps avoidance is a dish best served cold.

Caspian is halfway across the room when she decides this, pouring a glass of wine from a decanter on a side table. Distance makes her appreciate the changes of time, that his shoulders are broader and his hair longer, and something that looks disgustingly like a knife scar trails from the side of his throat into the neck of his shirt. He is mussed from sleeping, but his movement is still smoother than the last time they met, and when he returns to her side and gives her the glass with the tacit, unspoken agreement that she will surrender her wounded palm, she knows that in the interim he has become a man and she has become a child.

It isn't that Susan has forgotten about Narnia altogether—how can she, when Ed and Lucy and Peter persist in airing maudlin recollections at the dinner table every night?—but that she has forgotten the way Caspian's voice tastes like the spice in Narnian wine, that the air always smells faintly of smoke and metal, less acrid than London, that there are lots of little details that make her memories reality rather than the faint impressions of a long-ago fantasy.

By convincing herself to grow up, she has lost her tenuous grasp on the Life and Times of Old Queen Susan, and the poise that had carried her through her earlier interactions with Caspian deserts her now, in the smudgy darkness of his bedroom when she needs it most. He draws her closer to the fire, carefully presses at her palm as he sits on a wooden stool and reaches for the basin of water rather handily nearby, and Susan is filled with the urge to murmur inanities, to speak, to say anything.

But Caspian has become like the soldiers on the train, the university boys down the road, and Susan while is comfortable enough being dismissive of the students at St. Jude's, but she feels tongue-tied caught between an older, taller, harder Caspian and the physical press of the fire at her back. She tries to remember what it was like to be twenty-one and a queen, but she cannot corral her emotions enough to hazard an attempt at that long-ago cool civility.

Then Caspian drags the corner of a wet rag down the center of her palm and says, "What are you doing here?"

"I have no idea," she says. "I was visiting the country, and I fell."

"I noticed," he says drily, and flicks a look at her from under his eyelashes. The motion draws together Susan's stomach like a loose thread, but the sarcasm centers her. Susan Pevensie can handle sarcasm, after years of living with Ed.

"Had you?" she replies. She realizes two seconds too late that she is being flirtatious, and immediately dampens her tone. "I'm not sure what happened, but I probably won't be here for long."

Caspian says nothing to this, and she lets out a deep breath, masking the act by reaching up and tugging a hand through her hair. Too late again by half, she remembers that she hasn't worn her hair down in years (not since she was a child, or at least not since she was a queen and believed it too) and has to tug out her hairpins rather than surrender the motion and lose face.

She almost wonders if the hairpins were a bad idea, as Caspian watches her unpin her hair with almost blatant anticipation, and when the final whorl is loosened and she has a mass of half-frizzy, half-waved hair in a sort of aerated haze around her head that can hardly be considered attractive, he waits for an eternally tense five seconds before leaning forward and pressing a kiss to the hollow underside of her wrist. His lips are chapped, her skin thin, and they are neither what they used to be, but the heat of the connection is achingly familiar.

He murmurs something to her skin, and she says (slightly irritated, but perhaps she has a right to be), "Don't mumble" in the sharp voice she uses with Michael, and he draws her between his legs and tangles his fingers in her hair and swallows her whole. She notices immediately the change, as she is tall and he is below her, but he controls the motion with a grip on the back of her neck, and slants his mouth to taste her in a way that would have startled their audience of before. Even though her palm still aches and his mouth is damp and welcome, she cannot stop thinking, cannot help this feeling of hopelessness, of loss, of something not quite right.

Eventually they have to break for the necessity of air, and Caspian's hooded eyes are predatory, raking over her face and down her front, and he is eyeing the buttons of her blouse rather like he is about to wage a war on her deportment, and she stares at the little white scar over his eyebrow like she is about to let him, and then her hand spasms with pain and she cannot muffle her cry.

"Oh," he says, and he flips his grip on her injured hand so that he can see the splinter of wood in her palm. "I am very sorry, Susan, I forgot. It was inconsiderate of me." Even as he says it, she knows he doesn't regret what he has done. For all the sensation of oddness, Susan cannot quite regret it either.

"It's all right," she says, swallowing the need to say anything more. His fingers are calloused, the nails understandably short, so he apologizes with his eyes as he uses a small knife to pry the splinter from her skin. She balances by propping a hand on his shoulder, and he carefully worries the wood free with minimum bloodshed, no fuss, and no more talking. The silence is incomplete, broken by the snap of the logs in the fire and the low buzz of his guards outside (the doors were always drafty, she somewhat inanely remembers).

When he is done, he dampens the handkerchief and wraps it twice around her palm, pressing a kiss of light tenderness in the center. His lips trail from her hand to her wrist, and are stopped a little below her elbow by the tapered sleeves of her sweater. "Susan, I," he says, and he has begun to sound like the nervous Caspian she never dreamed about, and she is beginning to grow more practical, less frazzled, and so she kisses him, either to preserve the status quo as it is or hurry the shift.

He stands with dizzying quickness, and catches her sides between his palms, sliding fingers under the hem of her sweater and reaching for the skin under her thin blouse with a greediness that she is only vaguely familiar with (he used to be so occupied with revenge). She arches against him, and he pushes her backwards, towards the bed where they first met again, and he is trying to ask her if she is sure she wants to do this when her back of her knees catch on the edge of the mattress and she falls.

She lands on her butt and elbows, splayed at the bottom of the hill like a caricature of grace, the ruins of the Professor's house spread around her in a semi-circle. Above her stretches a fairly obvious line of destruction, which ends in the remains of what once might have been a wardrobe and then begins again two feet above where she now lies.

For a while, all Susan is capable of doing is tucking in her blouse and struggling to her feet. There is a handkerchief knotted around her palm, but she doesn't want to think about Caspian, doesn't want to consider that she's lost her mother's hairpins, scattered on the bedroom floor of the man who used to be the boy she might have once fallen in love with. She curls her fingers around the damp cloth but pushes everything else out of her mind and starts the climb back to the path.

Once again on stable land, she lights a fag and heads towards Mrs. Wetherby's house, racing against the storm clouds with bare indifference. She makes it back in good time, and exchanges Michael's wellies for her high heels and finds the spare hairpins in her bag. As Mrs. Wetherby packs the once-empty basket with goods for Michael and his sister, she slips into the wash room and checks on her hand. The wound is pink and puckered like a week-old scar, and she holds the handkerchief in her grip for a while, unsure as to whether or not she should discard it—it's covered in blood, and probably not reusable.

It is the faintly embroidered 'C' on the edge that decides her eventually. She throws away the handkerchief, and leaves the wash room. On the train ride back into London, she listens to Michael's chatter and watches the rain push against the glass windows. She is not really surprised that he hasn't noticed that she and his mother get along like rival alley cats, and tells herself to find his ineptitude endearing.

"I had a lovely day," he tells her on her doorstep. She clutches at her jar of Mrs. Wetherby's gooseberry jam and kisses his cheek.

"Lovely," she tells him perfunctorily. "Absolutely lovely."

* * *

_So. This is me, attempting to justify Susan's motives in the events of _The Last Battle___._ Thoughts? This was my first stab at the Pevensies (and their general awesomeness).


End file.
